In a murky, blue-lit tank, Alia Bhatt’s Alpha and Bobby Deol’s nameless assassin trade knife strikes in slow-motion, water resistance turning every slash into a desperate gasp. This single scene, roughly halfway through the runtime, contains more raw, tactile intensity than the entire Act 3 combined.
Alia Bhatt Fights Like She Means It, Talks Like She’s Had Practice
Alia commits physically. The infiltration of her stepfather’s soldier facility sees her move with cold, precise brutality, and the underwater sequence demands stunt work most action heroes would blanch at. She also lands the emotional beats, her voice cracks believably when she screams that the program will destroy them all.
Yet performance cannot fix script problems. When the screenplay asks her to deliver exposition rather than violence, the energy flatlines.
Shiv Rawail Knows Action, Forgets Momentum
Director Shiv Rawail, returning from the YRF Spy Universe’s earlier *Tiger* entry, stages fights like a combat choreographer. The soldier facility infiltration uses tight angles and sharp cuts that actually clarify geography. But the screenplay by Soumil Shukla, Shridhar Raghavan and Ishita Moitra trips over its own third act. The final confrontation that should crackle devolves into a talk-heavy explanation of the soldier program. A critic consensus of 6.8/10 on Rotten Tomatoes feels generous given how thoroughly the finish line collapses.
Rawail needed a sharper editor for the second half. The pacing stumbles badly after the underwater setpiece, and the climactic exposition dump kills whatever narrative tension remained.
Action-Mystery Execution
The central genre promise here is high-octane espionage blended with brutal action, and for the first 90 minutes, Rawail delivers. The infiltration sequence in Act 1 uses the YRF Spy Universe playbook, gadgets, surveillance, sudden violence, with a genuinely inventive geography. Alpha scales a ventilation shaft, eliminates guards with quick, silent takedowns, and the camera stays close enough that you feel the impact.
The underwater knife fight between Alpha and Bobby Deol is the film’s peak. The water muffles sound, distorts bodies, and forces a claustrophobic combat rhythm that few Hindi action films attempt. The choreography here is precise: each strike has weight, each recoil carries the drag of water. It justifies the ₹120 crore budget by itself.
But the mystery component, the soldier program’s inner workings, deteriorates into predictable reveals by Act 2. The plot twist regarding the stepfather’s blood-transmitted illness (“I’ve caught something”) arrives with so little shock that the audience I watched with actually laughed. An 8.1/10 BookMyShow score suggests audiences forgave the sag, but I found the second half’s structural slump hard to ignore.
Anil Kapoor’s Menace Meets a Script That Forgets Him
Anil Kapoor plays the stepfather-antagonist with a controlled, calculating stillness that hints at genuine menace. His delivery of the “I’ve caught something” line carries the right sinister undertone. But the script never deepens his motivation beyond “illicit soldier program leader.” He becomes a plot function in a suit. Bobby Deol fares slightly better, his assassin character has physical presence and delivers his line about hiding from one’s past with grizzled conviction. But his motivations remain so vague he might as well be a hired stuntman with dialogue. Sharvari Wagh, as the co-agent, balances action competence with enough empathetic beats to make you wish the film split its focus more evenly between the two women.
Audience Reception: A Hit With Caveats
Box Office India reports an opening day of ₹45.2 crore and a first-week total of ₹182.5 crore, solidly ahead of its ₹120 crore budget. The film is officially a hit, driven by YRF Spy Universe loyalty and Alia Bhatt’s fanbase. Yet 28% negative social media sentiment and complaints about the second half’s slugging pace suggest that repeat audiences may be scarce. The 7.2/10 IMDb average tells the story: people like the action, tolerate the plotting, and leave feeling slightly undersold.
If you want to see tightly-built Hindi action-choreography anchored by a lead who commits fully to the physical register, this delivers in patches. But bring patience for the stretches where the film talks about its plot instead of showing it. The best format is IMAX, where the underwater sequence and the infiltration’s spatial logic register most clearly.
For subscribers who want to dig into more Bollywood action-craft, check the rest of our Hindi Thriller reviews for deeper breakdowns of setpiece geography and performance registers.
Alpha earns a solid 3 out of 5, a muscular action debut for Alia Bhatt that can’t outrun its own exhausted third act.
If the underwater knife fight piqued your curiosity, Rawail’s earlier Alpha review in *Alpha* shares a similar commitment to visceral physicality.
And for a puzzle-box narrative that also stumbles in its final stretch, flower she verdict mirrors this film’s structural ambition and executional betrayal.
